What Price Success?
A Monday Morning Memo from the Wizard of Ads,
April 2000
Roy Williams
His
neck caught under a spring-loaded bale, the
little mouse looks up at me with anxious eyes. He is extremely uncomfortable,
but breathing. Is it my imagination, or do I hear a tiny, choked voice saying,
"You can keep the cheese, sir, just please let me out of the trap?"
My suspicion is that this little mouse has been
to a seminar where a razzle-dazzle motivator encouraged him to tape a picture
of his goal over his bathroom mirror. Staring at the photo of the cheese each
day, the mouse chants the motivator’s mantra, "You can do it, you’re
a winner, you can do it, you’re a winner," and of course he is right.
The little mouse soon gets what he wants, never pausing to consider the wire
bale that might come with it. (His new goal is simply to take that picture off
the bathroom mirror.)
The little mouse was focused on the cheese and
committed to achieving it and while focus and commitment are essential to success,
overfocus and overcommitment are commonly called obsession and addiction; neither
of which leads to happiness.
Like all of us, you are spending the minutes, hours,
and days of your life in the pursuit of something and you are buying it with
your very life. Have you inspected the package? Are you chasing what you really
want or might there be a spring-loaded bale attached to the cheese?
Too many people today are focused on what they
think they want without giving a thought to what they don’t want that might
come with it. Ignore the sales trainers who urge you to tape your favorite magazine
ads onto your bathroom mirror. I can promise you that nothing clipped from a
magazine is worthy of your life.
What do you really want?
|